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Interview with Voting Machine Company Reps
laupsavid writes "Here's an interesting interview with government and industry reps on the Black_Box_Voting site. I think it's funny (yet terrifying), almost like an extended Shark-Tank Unclear on the Concept item. They interview Paul Miller, Registration and Systems Manager of the Office of the Secretary of State. Black Box Voting is dedicated to informing people of reasons to reject electronic voting systems. I believe Bev Harris runs the site, and she claims to be an expert on accounting fraud. Also, see this area of the a site called Ecotalk for a list of instances of purported fraud by electronic voting."
and hate it at the same time.
This interview (while somewhat hostile), does illustrate why I hate it - we have voting system companies that refuse to make their systems open that are, in turn, monitored by officials that do not understand how the systems can be tampered with.
I think our elected officials just aren't ready to handle technology, unfortunately.
Oh, any voting system that doesn't provide a hard-copy output of how I voted to be used as a check is a voting system I don't trust - a pure touch-screen system should provide a printout that I can confirm, and hand in, where it will be filed much the way traditional ballots are file. The actual counting can be purely electronic for all I care, until a recount is requested, in which case the paper ballots should be used - any tampering significant enough to alter the election should be trivially detectable using this system.
A technological solution to a problem is accused of shortcomings under the assumption that the manual solution to the problem does not have the same shortcomings.
In my opinion, anybody that presents an argument that electronic voting is particularly subject to fraud must factor in the amount of fraud that already goes on in non-electronic elections.
It doesn't matter wether the votes are tallied electronically, manually or telepathically; if we have no [realistic] way to make the vote counters accountable, then it's all for nothing.
In other words, the problem isn't the mechanism, it's the implementers.
In all seriousness though, with some hard-wirded electronics (rather than software), it should be pretty easy to construct a virtually fraud-proof voting machine that resembles the old-style ones but isn't as expensive to manufacture or maintain.
I voted in the last election for governor in Florida with the new voting machines.
As they stand right now, they give me the creeps: They do not give you a print-out for backup. And there is no way to look at the code by an independent auditor because the republican Kath "Cruella" Harris declared the code a propietary secret. Only the vendor has the right to audit their own code and certify it as bug free.
An open system should print a ballot that goes into a ballot box as a back-up and it should be open for any independent party to review. If not how do we know there is no fraud involved?
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
The purpose of a democratic election is not to determine a winner. Every conflict, democratic or not, peaceful or not, ends up generating winners. No, the purpose of an election is to make everyone agree who lost, and to generate (through a future election) a preplanned battlefield for a future engagement.
Only through this process can the costs of conflict -- which are often substantial, sometimes far greater than the value of what's being fought over -- itself be minimized.
Some engineers with no knowledge of politics imagine voting is a counting problem. Given hundreds, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of individual polling sites, how can the numbers be collated and reported accurately? How can the top scoring candidate be identified and informed of his or her success? In short: Who won?
They miss the point entirely: The problem is never the winner. The winner is not the one to doubt or challenge the system. The winner is always happy to win -- it's never the party in the lead that calls for a recount. No. The problem is with those to whom power has been denied. They are the ones that the entire system exists for; they are the ones who the process is designed to satisfy. We hold out a carrot -- you will have your chance again in some time -- and ultimately, a stick: You failed to convince enough people that your cause was worthy, that your message was true. We brought your message to the people, and they turned away.
That doesn't say "You won." That proves "You lost." This is why it is so critical to have a genuine paper trail for voting systems: Any idiot can tell you who won, but once the facts disappear -- once the finger rises from the touch screen -- there is no mark, no evidence, no proof at all. That doesn't mean the election won't have an outcome: Courts can quite easily, by fiat, declare that the voting system may not be challenged. By fiat, then, they decide who won.
Fiat -- legalese for "Because I said so" -- does not a proof make. Fiat declares a winner; it cannot prove a loser. Thus it fails, utterly and completely, to serve the purpose of the election system itself. Open and unambiguous access to the voting architecture is critical if we are to provide an election system that defies the sour grapes of a failed candidate. Anything less makes a farce of the election process -- why go through the rigamarole if people have no reason to believe the results?
The sad part is, most engineers have settled on the most obvious solution: Touch screen voting, with a human readable (but easily computer-auditable, through the use of the standard OCR fonts that have been on checks for decades) printout that is stored for recount purposes. (The printout is on difficult to forge official paper, and contains some piece of data that did not exist before the election, akin to POW's holding a newspaper.) At that point, there are a few choices -- have the touch screens also communicate to a central office, which collates votes and designates 5% of precincts randomly for immediate on-site audit, or perhaps skip the touch screen link and have each site read the votes from the printouts and only the printouts. Given a challenge, the computers speak the same language we do, and possess logs in the same physical format we can analyze. A challenged result can be answered with evidence -- and thus the challenge is not likely to be made at all, for that would be yet another failure for the candidate.
Elections without evidence see their legitimacy drain away like blood from a sliced jugular. Without evidence, it's not that the victor cannot be shown, it's that the challenger cannot be refuted. Shaking ones shoulders, saying "I'm not going to prove a negative", is insufficient. Blind touch-screeners leave elections vapid and useless, an exercise in futility that doesn't raise an eyebrow when precisely 100% of the (remaining?) population votes for Saddam.
It's honestly surprising that, in this d
ok, I read it, unfortunately what I expected. Shuck and jive and dodging the critical questions by the manufactureres rep. The election official gets a last minute Cd with the "upgrade" so it gets run. Who's verified the original program? "they did, trust them" Who's verified the Cd? "they did trust them" Who mailed it, was it switched, a man in the middle, what if the programmer is compromised through bribery and blackmail? "never happen, trust them"
phooie, it's a scam, a sophisticated scam
None of those get answered. I'm convinced it's corrupt, last election in the state of georgia, first all state wide computerised voting. Uh huh. Biggest political upsets since the civil war, and they also contradicted both the pre and post polling.
A "coincidence" I am s-o-o-o-o sure....
Yep, no fraud there, move along, nothing to see...
I harangued my poll "official", she was clueless. I asked how do you verify a recount if requested, She said they ran the tally program again. duh, if it was compromised OF COURSE it would still show the same erroneous numbers. You could run the recount program as long as you wanted to, it wouldn't matter. She had no idea, I honestly failed to be able to get her to understand this simple concept, most likely because of brainwashing of trusting the state and some unaccountable corporation, and being very unfamiliar with computers. So instead of fraud attempts having to be done at the local level, they can now be done more efficiently and widespread from a centralised location.
It's been going on before that, the gross results were being tallied at a central location, no audits there either.
The system is so broken it ain't funny, they just have become extremly slick in giving the illusion of elections.
Computers are good for some things, for elections they are *not*.
This is exactly the same syndrome that used to make people wary of e-commmerce back in the 90s: "it's in computers! I don't understand computers! Anything could happen!" And just like it's easier for the shop clerk to steal your credit card number when he's ringing up your purchase, it's actually a lot easier to rig elections when they're done manually than when they're done electronically (as Jeb Bush will happily inform you) because you can declare big chunks of those paper ballots "unreadable" and exclude them from manual counting, which is what happened in Florida in 2000 in a number of democrat areas.
Electronic voting is instant, traceable, and most importantly interactive: how much would all those idiots who accidentally voted for Buchanan in 2000 have appreciated a dialog box popping up saying "You are about to vote for X"?
When the only record is in easily manipulatable form with no double-check possible, then manipulating it is trivial. With the amount of money that goes into ensuring that the vote goes the way that moneyed interests want, there is plenty of incentive to manipulate it.
Just ask Chuck Hagel, senator for Nebraska. Who before his surprise election (it wasn't what polls predict should have happened) a few years ago was CEO of the company that counts the electronic ballots in Nebraska. (About 70% of the vote.)
As for paper, I am sure that lots of people in Florida would like having the electronic tabulating machine spit out spoiled ballots immediately so that you get a second try at not spoiling your ballot. Machines which were perfectly capable at doing that were widely deployed in Florida in 2000. Better yet, the machines had a switch that turns the behaviour on and off. By flipping that switch based on how a given area votes, you choose which areas have a 10% spoil rate versus approximately 0%. It is no coincidence that by a large majority, the spoiled ballots in Florida (spoiled because someone, eg, did not fill in the bubble completely) were clearly intended to be for Gore.
Oh, and some of Jeb's tricks would work no matter what your voting system is. Tricks such as improperly excluding over 50,000 people (most blacks) from the rolls for being felons in other states - when most of them weren't. Oh, and when that exclusion had been ruled repeatedly in the courts to be unconstitutional.
Are these paranoid fantasies? I only wish...
The real potential for electronic voting is the opportunity to improve the voting system itself.
There are many voting systems possible besides simple "one man, one vote". In fact, "one man, one vote" is probably the worst of all (of course, Arrow proved no perfect voting system is possible).
There are some alternative systems here.
Get a cheap screen. Put some buttons on the side. The voter presses the button to go with the right candidate, as displayed on the screen. This interface is easier and more reliable than any touch screen I've used. And it's so damn simple and reliable...
When you're done, just like an ATM, you get a receipt (aka voter printout). The identical receipt is printed and stored inside the machine, and the result is electronically stored or immediately uploaded elsewhere. No one would ever make an ATM without that paper roll inside (or the receipts printed for the customer)... I honestly cannot think of any valid reason not to do so, except to deliberately enable fraud. The printers aren't expensive.
If you wanted to be clever, you'd put a number or bar code or somesuch on every ballot, and within maybe 30 minutes the voter could return to the machine, invalidate their old vote, and enter a new vote. If the voter gets a printout it's not as helpful if they can't do anything if they realized they voted incorrectly. But that correction process does add the potential for fraud (though of course the correction would be logged for future auditing).
Someone else suggested an even simpler system where the machine prints out a ballot, and the ballot is put in a ballot box (after confirmation by the voter). Create something both machine and human readable (machine by OCR, so there's no possibility for the vote being inconsistent)... not as fast to count as electronic results returned by a modem, but does that really matter? Higher accuracy than punch cards, and highly transparent (so long as ballot boxes don't get lost...)
Lastly, election boards should be running exit polls. Not for any official purpose or in order to report to the public, but as another safeguard against both fraud and mistaken results. If the results of that sampling are too far from the actual results, then something went wrong. It won't correct those problems, but it's a final way to check that there are no massive inaccuracies in the voting.
Anyone concerned with electoral fraud in the US, the use of poisoned databases to cull legitimate voters from the electoral rolls, and the future of voting might want to read Chapter One - Jim Crow In Cyberspace [PDF] of the book.
Choice Quote -
"One can't sabotage democracy with felon lists alone. Balloteating machines worked well in Gadsden and other Black counties, but cyberspace offers even more opportunities for fun and games. This time, it's "touch screen" voting. No paper trail, no audit path, no fights over recounts: recounts are impossible.
"Florida is the first state to adopt this video-game voting technology. Secretary of State Harris immediately certified the reliability of one machine, the iVotronic, from Election Systems and Software of Omaha. On their Web site, there is a neat demo of their foolproof system you can try out. I did - and successfully cast an "over-vote," a double vote for one candidate. Then the site crashed my laptop. But hey, the bugs will be worked out . . . or worked in.
"The question is, who else is touching the touch screen? In the case of the iVotronics, it's Sandra Mortham. Ring a bell? She was Harris's Republican predecessor as secretary of state, the one who hired DBT. Now she's iVotronics representative in Florida."
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Not just fraud - but what happens if the machines ust screws up? Without a paper backup, are the votes just LOST?
If you place your fingers on two or three pre-determined locations (e.g. opposite corners) while making a vote selection, then all current (or subsequent) vote are changed such that 1/3 of all votes go to your preferred choice.
This 'feature' would be essentially impossible to find in logic testing, and would not depend on the egg programmer knowing anything beforehand about what the vote questions would be, when the vote would take place or even how many 'test' votes were done.. All you would need would be someone who could make it to the polling station at the appropriate time in the voting process (beginning or end) to activate the egg.
Without a voter verified paper trail, it would be almost impossible to verify that such a cheat had been used. -- remember it could also be encoded in the prom firmware of the machine -- not just the truly soft software, and it could sit there for years, until an appropriately critical vote occurred (or an appropriately large bribe was paid).
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.